My exhibition in the Capitainerie in Stenay, Meuse, France
“Nobody is perfect”. It’s a well-known saying.
Implicitly it says that perfection is the norm. It’s something we have to
strive for. And so we do, at least often, or at least many of us. In our work.
When we educate our children. Advertisements tell us what the best products are
for looking great, ... and we buy them. Some writers tend to work infinitely on
a book, for as long as it is not perfect they do not want to publish it. Look
around and you’ll see plenty of instances in which perfection is the goal or
where it is important.
As such there is nothing against perfection, but I
have two remarks. What does it mean? Perfection is not something objective but
it is a norm and as such it is only a view on what is important; it’s a
standpoint and nothing else. Moreover, hidden in the idea of perfection is the
view that it makes you happier. But does it?
I do not want to substantiate these remarks here, but
I want to say something about a case of the pursuit of perfection: The pixel
race in photography: the striving to make cameras with more and more pixels. No
sooner has a camera come on the market with a sensor with x thousand pixels than
another camera producer brings out one with an even larger number of pixels.
And so the race goes on. The idea is that the more pixels a sensor has the
better it is. For a sensor with more pixels produces sharper photos, and the
sharper a photo is the better it is. Is it true?
Until not so long ago photo sensors produced images
that were a bit blurred, certainly in comparison with analogue photos. Since
sharp photos are considered better, camera producers developed sensors with
more pixels in order to solve this problem. The result is that today photos
taken with digital cameras are better, so sharper, than old-fashioned analogue
photos. As a consequence analogue cameras were pushed off the market. However,
the pixel race still goes on. Camera producers continue to make cameras with
sensors with more and more pixels making digital images increasingly sharper
through the years.
Is this a good development? In a certain sense it is,
but what I find annoying is that nobody seems to ask the question what making more
perfect and better cameras means. If new cameras really make better images, why
are there then still people who prefer old or simple cameras? Even more, why
are there still people who make paintings, for example painted portraits? For
isn’t then a photographed portrait simply better than a painted portrait and so
to be preferred? Apparently for many people the answer is “no”, so there is
something else that makes a photo good. But commercially it is not interesting.
When I am on an art market with my photos, many people
spontaneously tell me that they like my photos or even that they find them
beautiful. When I am talking to them, I often say that most of my photos are
analogue (on my last art market, I had some twenty analogue photos and one or
two digital ones). I think that it’s an indication that beauty and perfection
do not go together; or maybe they do but then it means that perfection is as
subjective as beauty is. And indeed, I like it to take photos “off road”, in a
way that deviates from the main stream approach. So I still use my old analogue
camera and I use also a so-called pinhole camera, which is a camera without a lens,
(the readers of these blogs will have noticed, however, that I do not shun the
digital way: most of my blog photos here are “modern”). A pinhole camera
produces pictures that are far from perfect, for they are blurred. And a
blurred picture is one of the cardinal sins in photography. Is it? Apparently
not all people think so, for just these blurred, vague and coarse-grained pinhole
pictures catch always more attention than any other photos in my presentations.
And many people find them better. Even more: My first big exhibition will show
just such pinhole photos: 25 imperfect blurred coarse-grained photos showing
the River Meuse from its source east of Dijon till Rotterdam. Where can you see
it? In Stenay in Lorraine in France. So if you are going to visit the battle
fields of Verdun this summer, or if you’ll be there for another reason, go to
Stenay as well, for “il vaut le détour” (It’s worth the trip): The photos are
like paintings.
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